TL;DR- dragons are what happen when you mash together big cats, big snakes, and big birds of prey
TL;DR- dragons are what happen when you mash together big cats, big snakes, and big birds of prey
Nurple
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This is part of the reason that I think that if (and that’s a BIG “if”) the government is by some chance in contact with aliens, the president probably isn’t in the loop.
Let’s imagine Bill Clinton started a conversation with a civilization based around proxima centauri (the nearest star to the sun) the day he took office. Assuming no FTL travel/communication, they’re a bit over 4 light years away, that means it takes 4+ years for our message to reach them, and the same amount of time for us to receive their reply, Bill is out of office by the time we get a reply, so their message reaches W probably right around 9/11, then the next reply we get is a year or so into Obama’s presidency, then about halfway through Trump’s term they probably just received his message, and depending on how this next election turns out either Biden will get their reply in about 2027 or Trump will be the first president who could have had a full back-and-forth with another planet since Grover Cleveland EDIT: FDR (forgot about his wonky terms) (which is a scary through.) That’s a hell of a way to have a conversation.
That timeline of course gets shorter if we’re dealing with aliens based out of our solar system or somewhere in interstellar space, or potentially much longer if they’re somewhere much further away than the nearest star to us.
If the government is in contact with aliens, I think it would have to be in the hands of some career military types or unelected bureaucrats whose careers can last decades and they have more opportunities to pick and groom their successors.
A lot of the world drinks a lot of espresso or at least French press, while most of what we drink in the US is drip coffee which is weaker. And when we do go for espresso drinks, a lot of us tend to favor ones that are fairly diluted (often with sugary flavored syrups and such which it’s own kind of American insanity I suppose)
Overall we do drink a lot of coffee, but it’s a bit less insane when you account for that.
Personally, and I’m not sure how this stacks up against my countrymen, but I take a 20oz (a bit less than 600ml) thermos of coffee to work with me most days and drink it throughout the morning until lunch time. Caffeine wise, that’s maybe a bit more than having 2 double shots of espresso, which doesn’t strike me as too insane, though again I’m coming from a very American perspective.
In general my understanding is coal was trees, oil was mostly algae and plankton, and mostly started forming well before the first true dinosaurs.
Technically some of that plankton would be considered animals, though probably not something you’d easily recognize as being an animal (side-note: I’d be curious to hear some vegetarians/vegans weigh in on the theoretical ethics of eating zooplankton)
I’m sure there’s some edge cases, traces of more complex animals and such getting mixed in with dead plankton, and at the end of the day carbon is carbon regardless of where it comes from